Talladega `Sweet Home, Alabama' For Junior.

April 30, 2005|By Ed Hinton Staff Writer

TALLADEGA, Ala. — There is no better place for Dale Earnhardt Jr. to break his slump.

He's winless this season, 12th in the point standings and hounded with questions about whether he and teammate Michael Waltrip should have swapped crews in the offseason. Earnhardt can send all that up in the smoke of celebratory burnouts Sunday afternoon.

"We're just real confident," he said going into Sunday's Aaron's 499.

Small wonder. Earnhardt has won five of the past seven races at Talladega Superspeedway and has finished second in the other two.

One loss was to Waltrip. In the other, Earnhardt was robbed, if you were swayed by the thunderous boos and hailstorm of beer cans that rained down on the end of this race a year ago.

All in all, Earnhardt may have been born in Kannapolis, N.C., but to him, this is Sweet Home, Alabama.

Nowhere on the Nextel Cup circuit do Earnhardt's red-clad legions of worshippers gather in greater numbers than here.

The 143,000-seat grandstands, and the sea of humanity in the infield, are majority red, as surely as they were majority black during his late father's reign as Alabama's favorite adopted son.

Earnhardt Sr. won a record 10 times here, including the 76th and final Cup victory of his life, in October 2000.

"I want to keep that Earnhardt family name at the top of the record books," Junior said. "Keep the family tradition going."

His faithful in red were in full voice at the '04 spring race when split-second after a final caution flew, Earnhardt passed Jeff Gordon for the lead. But in freezing the field at the moment the caution lights came on, NASCAR moved Earnhardt back to second place.

There he remained, helpless, as the fans' antithesis of Earnhardtism, Gordon, cruised to victory under caution and the storm of boos and beer cans.

To prevent further crowd uprisings, NASCAR created the "green-white-checkered" rule, allowing for two laps of green-flag overtime, to cut down on yellow-flag finishes. Had it been in effect for the Aaron's 499 of '04, both he and Gordon believe the No. 8 Budweiser Chevy was stronger than the No. 24 Dupont and likely would have made the winning pass.

This year has been a different story. Before this season started, the higher-ups at Dale Earnhardt Inc. -- nobody's saying exactly who -- ordered a major shuffle in the Waltrip and Earnhardt units.

They swapped crews and a fleet of cars. Earnhardt, all through his NASCAR career, had worked with tandem crew chiefs, the Eurys, Tony Sr. and Tony Jr. This year he had to start over in building communication with Pete Rondeau.

Eury Sr. was promoted to team manager, and Eury Jr. became Waltrip's crew chief.

Earnhardt finished third at Daytona after Rondeau finally sorted out a fitully handling car toward the end of the race.

Another Gordon win, his third in the last four restrictor-plate races, gave rise to speculation that the DEI dominance on plate tracks was over.

But, "Daytona is more of a handling track," Gordon said, predicting even then that "at Talladega [bigger, wider, more forgiving] you're going to see Junior right back up there again as the man to beat."

Through the rough finishes this season, "I never saw one guy, whether on the 8 team [his], the 15 team [Waltrip's] or anywhere in the whole place, take a break or ask any questions," Earnhardt said. "Everybody just stayed with their head down to what their job was, and kept working."

Decent finishes recently of fourth at Bristol, 13th at Martinsville, ninth at Texas and fourth at Phoenix have left him within easy shooting range of the Top 10, where he needs to be in September to qualify for the Chase for the Championship.

Now, here, he feels his fate is back in his own hands, the opposite of most drivers at Talladega who feel that the fickle drafting lines and aerodynamic forces take racing out of their hands.

For other drivers, races here are nerve-racking, in huge, tight packs where one miscue can take out two dozen cars.

Earnhardt is so comfortable here that he even amuses himself by seeing who will follow him where on NASCAR's biggest oval, 2.66 miles around with 33-degree-banked turns.

He loves to get in front of the field, then take them high, take them low. Especially, "I like running around the top. It's fun to run up there because the car slides around a little bit."

That makes other drivers nervous, so some drop to the bottom and usually lose three or four places in the draft.

"I feel like we can run real good this weekend," he said. "This is a good opportunity for us to get a good finish and gain a whole lot more points."

To Earnhardt in his Sweet Home, Alabama, a good finish is first. A bad one is second.